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“Pre- Barack Obama, you could make the case that Eliott was a preeminent Democratic politician in America at that point.” – Jimmy Siegel

Number of Times Seen – 1 (15 Jan 2020)

Brief Synopsis – Documentary about the events that led to the downfall of the promising political career of New York Governor Eliot Spitzer.

My Take on it – Anyone who is a fan of recent political history is familiar with the story of the rise and fall of Eliot Spitzur.

This film tries to piece together all of the information about the story in order to try and find a compelling answer as to the how and why these events occurred.

They are able to connect the dots about things, but in too many parts of the film, the information feels much too rushed and things fail to be credible enough.

They are able to get key interviews with popular political pundits and even political opponents of Spitzer trying to explain things.

The addition of interviews with Spitzer himself also fails to help make the case for the how and why of it all and this hurts things much more than helps it along the way.

The film is almost 2 hours long long yet it doesn’t manage to come across as being comprehensive enough about everything and therefore just skims the surface of the facts as presented.

The movie even uses a ploy for the interview with the key witness of the case since she refused to be interviewed on camera.

Instead they hired an actress to play her part yet these interviews feel too unrealistic in form and content to take at face value.

In the end, this film fails to give us enough of a compelling reason for the how and why of it all and that unfortunately doesn’t allow for this film to be an informative as one might hope that it could be.

Bottom Line – Documentary that is able to describe the chain of events that eventually led to Spitzer’s fall from grace. The movie is able to not only give us interviews with key political pundits but also gets Spitzer himself to tell parts of the story. The film feels as if it rushes through the information which hurts things a bit too much and even at nearly 120 minutes this film feels incomplete because of the way things are presented to us. The film’s ploy of using an actress to read the lines during the interview with a key witness falls short of being realistic enough and it also hurts things more than helps when trying to get to the truth of the issues. The film doesn’t manage to give us a satisfying or compelling enough reason for the how and why things occurred and that is yet another reason why this doesn’t work as well as one might hope that it could.